How to encapsulate? Is it bad for children of nodes to interact with children of other nodes?

itgiawa

What are the design principles of nodes? Can anyone point me to an article that describes design mistakes where some code should not be interacting with other code?

For example, in my game I've got a Terrain node and its sibling is an Avatar node. The avatar's child is a camera. But I also want to send camera information to the Terrain node. This feels a little weird to me, since it would be nice if each node were totally modular, but I can't think of another way to do it...

I just wonder if there is a nice article on game design principles of encapsulation

DaveTheCoder

The method I've been using is "dependency injection". In this case, I would create a property of the Terrain named, for example, "camera", and have the parent of the Terrain and the Avatar set the value of the property to a reference to the Camera node. That way, the Terrain doesn't have to make any assumptions about siblings.

Erich_L

The design principles of nodes? Nope. I don't like that question one bit. The way to think is that in principle you design with your nodes- uhhh- in a tree hierarchy. My favorite way for communication is a "trickle-down" approach. Does your avatar have some important messages to send? Send it to your global script, let the global script iterate through the main nodes (which I'd call receivers in this context) and just do something like

if node.has_method("reactionary_function_name"): node.reactionary_function_name()

This way if later you want more than say the terrain node to get the message it's a piece of cake

itgiawa

Just to add to what the other guys have said. Here is a good article that explains the design problem and another solution which is to use "signals" https://kidscancode.org/godot_recipes/basics/node_communication/